Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora. (Courtesy Neon)
Eighty members of the Southeastern Film Critic’s Association have voted Anora as the best film of 2024. The organization polls its members, including this columnist, annually to determine the 10 best films of the year, and award outstanding acting performances, as well as awards for writing and directing.
It was a contentious year for the critics.The closest category in this year’s balloting was for Best Documentary. With only two ballots left to be tabulated, the category was a three-way tie between Will & Harper, Sugarcane, and Super/Man the Christopher Reeve Story. When the final two votes were added, Sugarcane, an investigation into the Canadian Indian residential school system by directors Julian Brave, NoiseCat, and Emily Cassie, took the crown.
Another close result resulted in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow just missing the top 10. The acclaimed A24 film about a TV show’s increasingly creepy fandom was narrowly edged out by James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, which hits theaters on Christmas Day.
“Between theatrical distribution and streaming, releases can be a bit scattered and hard to find, but if you take the time to find the better films of 2024, they form a potent lineup. We hope that film fans out there can use our Top 10 list to catch up on some of the best that 2024 had to offer.”
Look for my Best of 2024 in next week’s issue of the Memphis Flyer. Meanwhile, here are the complete results of the SEFCA’s poll.
In March 1966, Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the Army to fight in the Vietnam War, citing his Islamic faith as a reason and claiming conscientious objector status. At the peak of his boxing career, he was banned from the sport and spent the next four years in and out of the courtroom. In October 1970, he was finally granted a license to fight in Georgia, and on October 26th, he faced Jerry “The Bellflower Bomber” Quarry in Atlanta. In front of a sellout crowd, Ali took Quarry down in only three rounds, setting off a night of celebration in Atlanta’s Black community. At one infamous party, a group of Black gangsters celebrating the victory were set up and robbed at gunpoint by another group of Black gangsters, setting off a chain reaction of botched reprisals and mutual misunderstandings worthy of a Coen Brothers movie.
Years later, journalist Jeff Keating, writing for the Atlanta alternative weekly Creative Loafing, discovered that the person who threw the party, an ambitious hustler known as Chicken Man, was not killed, as had long been reported, but instead had survived the ordeal and was living under an assumed name in Atlanta. Keating recounted the too-weird-to-be-true story in his true crime podcast Fight Night. Released in 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it became a huge hit. Writer/producer Shaye Ogbonna and comedian Kevin Hart pitched the story to Universal Television, who ultimately ordered an eight-part limited series for their new streaming service Peacock.
Craig Brewer poses at the Fight Night premiere in New York City (Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Peacock)
One of the first calls they made was to Memphis director Craig Brewer. “I got this job the old-fashioned way,” he says. “I got a call from my agents saying that [executive producer] Will Packer and Kevin Hart wanted to meet with me on a project. … Shaye, the creator, has been a fan of my films, particularly Hustle & Flow, which he saw in Atlanta.”
Brewer was intrigued by the story and impressed with the rough drafts of the first two episodes, which were all that existed at the time. “I remember reading the script and thinking to myself, ‘This guy Shaye and I, I think are gonna really get along.’ We have the same interests in movies and TV and music. But more importantly, it’s something I always remember John Singleton talking to me about: ‘Is there regional specificity to this voice?’ And I was like, yeah, this feels like a guy from the South, in Atlanta, making movies from his heart, his culture, and his experience. It felt real to me; it felt furnished and honest and, above all, exciting.”
Fight Night: The Million DollarHeist was on its way to the screen.
Putting the Team Together
Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat and Will Packer Media had produced the podcast, says Brewer. “Kevin was always going to be Chicken Man. That was from the jump. Then I came on and we started putting together the other cast members.”
Kevin Hart stars as Chicken Man, the small-time hustler who gets in over his head in Fight Night. (Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)
Samuel L. Jackson, an acting legend who Brewer worked with in 2006’s Black Snake Moan, was quickly cast as New York gangster Frank Moten. Taraji P. Henson, who was the breakout star of Hustle & Flow, came onboard as Vivian, Chicken Man’s partner in crime. “She was always at the top of the list,” says Brewer. “Then Will Packer called me and said, ‘We gotta go get your boy Terrence.’”
Gangsters “Cadillac” Richie (Howard) and Frank Moten (Jackson) land in Atlanta with their entourage. (Photo: Parrish Lewis/PEACOCK)Jackson as Moten ignores the press before the big fight. (Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)
The producers thought Terrence Howard, star of Hustle & Flow, would be perfect for gangster Richard “Cadillac” Wheeler. “I’m speaking to you from New Jersey, so I’m speaking to you from Cadillac Richie’s territory,” says Brewer.
Terrence Howard and Marsha Stephanie Blake (Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK) Taraji P. Henson stars as Vivian Thomas. (Photo: Parrish Lewis/PEACOCK)
After Hustle, Brewer had directed Henson and Howard in the hit TV series Empire. “I called up Terrence, and I was kinda talking him into doing the show. I said to him, ‘Listen, it’s me. I’m gonna let you get up on that tight rope like you usually do. I’ll be your net. What I want you to do is bring your creativity to this and create this character because he’s an important character as the series goes on. I’m gonna just agree to anything you wanna do and help you get it.’ Then he said, ‘Well, I wanna look like one of the Bee Gees. That’s what I wanna do.’ I just remember feeling like, ‘Oh no, what is this gonna look like?’ But then he showed up, and I thought, ‘This cat is gonna steal this show because he looks amazing. … I don’t know if he’s gonna take it off ever again.’”
Detective J.D. Hudson (Cheadle) protects Muhammad Ali (Dexter Darden) before the fight. (Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)(Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)
The final big get for the cast was Don Cheadle. The actor/director was on Brewer’s bucket list. “I have always wanted to work with Don, and it was everything that I could have dreamed for and more. He’s a great actor, yes. But I would say that with him — and I would put Sam Jackson in the same category — you’re not just getting somebody’s acting talent, you’re getting their experience of making, watching, and living the art of storytelling. They have an eye for things that some younger actors do not have. Are we telling the right story? They make you better because they hold you to a standard of making sure that you’re doing right, not only by their character, but how their character interacts with everybody. So there were countless times that Don Cheadle would take me and Shaye off into his trailer, and we would work a scene. By the time we left the trailer, Shaye and I would look at each other and just go, ‘Man, the scene is just so much better!’”
Fight Night is filled with star power, in a way very few TV shows have ever been. “The thing about movie stars is, they are decided by the people,” says Brewer. “This show is packed with five movie stars.”
Hotlanta
Fight Night was filmed in Atlanta, Georgia. The series features extensive location shoots among the split-level ranch houses of the suburbs and in the dense city center. Crucial scenes were shot in the distinctive Hyatt Regency Atlanta, whose 22-story atrium influenced hotel design for a generation.
“There is a crucial monologue in episode two that Sam Jackson delivers, where he’s talking about his vision for Atlanta,” says Brewer. “He wants Black people put in places of power, and for the economic future of Atlanta to be Black. It’s funny because you look at the monologue, and you can imagine if it were being said in 1970 to an all-white audience, it may seem outlandish. But last night at the premiere, there were cheers because you realize that dream is here and realized. So it’s very interesting to talk to young people about Atlanta at this crucial time in its history, in the early 1970s, where they were on a campaign that I feel is comparable to Memphis’ history, and to Memphis’ present, which is to deny that you are living, working, and thriving in a Black city. It is to your own peril if you fight against it.
“Atlanta is a city that is open for business. We’re too busy to be dealing with any of that racist bullshit. We’re here to make some money, and I’ll be damned if that’s not the Atlanta that I go to all the time when I’m filming these movies. This is my third project in Atlanta. I’ve been there the whole time that Atlanta has said that they wanna be the next Hollywood. And so many people saying, well, that’s not gonna last, or this is gonna be transitional, or the industry is gonna change. I am telling you right now, no one wants to call it out, but production in Atlanta is there to stay. I don’t see this returning back to Hollywood as long as there’s places like Atlanta.”
Brewer had worked on episodic network TV with Empire, but Fight Night was his first limited series, a form that has become more common in the streaming era. Brewer compares the experience to shooting an eight-hour movie. Brewer directed the first two and last two episodes, and collaborated on the writing of the entire series. He describes the process as a mixture of careful prep and on-the-fly improv.
“I got a call from Shaye saying, ‘We got this idea to do the scene between Sam Jackson and Don Cheadle in an interrogation room,’” Brewer recalls. “We locked ourselves in a room and banged out this scene, probably had it written by like 8 o’clock, 9 o’clock at night. Then, the following morning, I went down to the sound stage and there they were, doing the scene that mere hours ago we had worked on. It’s amazing how fast it all happened. It was just so special because there’d be these moments where Shaye and I would write something, and we knew, ‘Okay, right here, Sam’s gonna probably make this part better. So let’s move on and know that he’s gonna come up with something great to say here — and sure enough, he did! It was this great moment of watching these titans just being amazing.”
Kevin Hart, one of the driving forces behind the development of the series, took the most chances. One of the best-known comedians in the country found a new lane as a dramatic actor. “I had a moment where I saw something that I had never seen before, and it kind of knocked me on my ass,” says Brewer. “It’s in episode two where Kevin Hart’s character is in grave danger, and he has to make a plea for his life. I’m sitting there at my monitor, and I watch Kevin make this tearful plea. That was one of the most real things I’ve ever seen an actor do. I remember just sitting there in awe thinking, ‘How could someone as successful as Kevin Hart actually have a whole other store of talent inside of him that we’ve yet to see? How can it be that he could drop everything that he is as the funniest man on the planet and actually be a dramatic actor?’ You make an assumption about a person, that maybe they don’t have this particular arrow in their quiver, and then suddenly they hit a bull’s-eye. I was stunned. Everyone was stunned. Terrence came up to me and he goes, ‘That cat’s the real deal.’”
Making the Music
Fight Night is set in 1970, a high point in the history of soul, funk, and R&B music. For Scott Bomar, producer and musician behind such acts as The Bo-Keys, that’s his wheelhouse. Bomar and Brewer have worked together on five movie and TV projects, beginning with Hustle & Flow in 2005. “I feel like I got spoiled working with him early on because he’s so musical,” Bomar says. “I find that the way Craig shoots, the way he directs his actors, the way he edits, it’s got a rhythm to it. I’ve worked with him enough now to kind of know what his rhythm is.”
Bomar says he was in “summer home repair mode” when Brewer called him out of the blue. “He said, I’m working on this TV show. Theoretically, if you had this gig, would you be able to do it? Are you available? And I’m like, sure, yeah. I can do it. I knew it was a pretty quick turnaround, but I had no idea exactly how quick of a turnaround it was. I think there were people involved who had their doubts on whether or not it was possible to do what we did in the amount of time we did it.”
Mixing engineer Jake Ferguson and composer Scott Bomar lent their talents to the series. (Photo: Chris McCoy)
Bomar and Brewer recorded the score to Fight Night at Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis. They had one week to take each episode from concept to final mix. “I can’t say enough about my collaboration with Scott Bomar,” says Brewer. “It’s something that truly is a collaboration. I see the scene, and Scott and I start just kind of grooving to a beat, to a track that has yet to be written. We start with rhythm. It really is kind of a Memphis way of doing it.”
Bomar enlisted several of his stable of veteran Memphis players, including drummer Willie Hall, who played on Isaac Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft.” Joe Restivo played guitar; Mark Franklin, Kirk Smothers, and Art Edmaiston contributed horn parts, along with Kameron Whalum, Gary Topper, and Yella P. Behind the board were veteran producer Kevin Houston and Jake Ferguson, who recently returned to Memphis after collaborating with superstar producer Mark Ronson. Most recently, Ferguson worked on the soundtrack to Barbie. “I feel like Craig came in and basically taught a master class on TV scoring,” Ferguson says.
“It’s quite a bit different than film because the schedule’s so accelerated,” says Bomar.
A 1970s vintage mini Moog synthesizer Bomar found in a closet at Sam Phillips Recording played a major role in creating the series’ soundscapes. In some cases, Bomar says they didn’t have time to assemble a full band, so he would have to play almost all of the instruments himself. “I’d say that this is the closest thing to a solo record I’ve ever made,” he laughs.
“It was fascinating to hear Scott and Craig talk about Atlanta in the ’70s and all the inspirations they had,” says Ferguson. “Musically, it was so cool to see how we can take, quote, unquote, ‘modern instruments’ and make them feel like you’re back in the ’70s. When we finished the first two episodes, it was just incredible to see how much the scenes would come to life with the music we added.”
“When we had the first mix, one of the producers said, ‘We asked Scott to do the impossible, and he’s done it,’” says Bomar. “That’s one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten.”
Final Fight
The first three episodes of Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist premiered on Peacock Thursday, September 5th. New episodes will drop every Thursday for the next five weeks. The night before it hit streaming, there was a star-studded premiere at Lincoln Center in New York City. I interviewed Brewer the next morning, as he was beginning preparations for his next project, a film he wrote called Song Sung Blue starring Hugh Jackman. The director was still reeling from the reception to Fight Night. “When you’re dealing with a brand like Will Packer and Kevin Hart, that means it’s gonna be a party. You can’t just do wine and cheese and a floral arrangement. There were dancers dressed in some of the outfits from the show. There was a Cadillac in the middle of the dance floor. It’s just a party and everybody was there! My son [Graham], I had to pull his ass off the dance floor last night at like 1 a.m., saying, ‘I gotta work, son! Let’s go!’ But he was out there, doing the wobble with everybody else. … It was such a great thing to see it with a crowd. Yeah, I think we got a great show here.”
Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, and Jamie Lee Curtis search for alien treasure in Borderlands.
“Zero percent! You don’t see that very often!”
That’s Claptrap (Jack Black), the robot in Borderlands, after being asked to calculate the odds of surviving an encounter with some Psychos in the Caustic Caverns beneath Pandora.
Coincidentally, “zero percent” was Borderlands score on Rotten Tomatoes when I checked it last weekend.
I only get preview screenings on very rare occasions these days. (Is it something I said? Knowing me, it probably was.) I usually don’t read any other critics before I watch a film for review. Like most pros, I have a love-hate relationship with Rotten Tomatoes. On the one hand, a congregator for reviews seems like a good idea. On the other hand, the site has reduced many people’s relationship with cinema culture and film criticism to a single statistical number, derived through means that sound scientific on the surface but are in fact quite dicey. On the third hand, they did invite me to contribute my reviews and remind me when I forget. So at least someone is paying attention to me!
This week, I was trying to decide between It Ends With Us, based on a romance novel by Colleen Hoover, the bestselling author of the decade, and Borderlands, based on a video game series I was vaguely familiar with. Word on the socials was that Borderlands was an epic stinker, so I glanced at the RT score. Zero percent is, like the robot says, not something you see very often. It’s Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 territory. Now, my choice was clear.
An RT goose egg doesn’t scare me. I saw Highlander II: The Quickening in the theater. Voluntarily. I had to see what was so bad about Borderlands. Maybe director Eli Roth would turn the aesthetic corner and create a film so bad it’s good! As a frequent flyer at Black Lodge Shitfest, I appreciate a good trainwreck. For me, the last so-bad-its-good pic — what the SubGenius community calls badfilm — was Gods of Egypt. It’s got everything: Geoffrey Rush phoning it in as the sun god Ra! Chadwick Boseman solving the riddle of the sphinx! Tiny Courtney Eaton! I can’t look away.
Gods of Egypt got 14 percent “good” reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Checking RT as I write this, after opening weekend, Borderlands has soared to 8 percent. The positive notices come mostly from sources that aren’t exactly cinematic tastemakers — like Polygon, who praise anything related to video games.
So how bad is Borderlands? I regret to inform you, it is a very bad film, but not badfilm. Borderlands the game is a first-person shooter released in 2009. Even the original was excessively derivative. Pandora, the planet on which the action takes place, shares a name with the homeworld of Avatar’s Na’vi, but it looks like Mad Max’s post-apocalyptic Australia. More accurately, it looks like Fallout, the classic video game from 1988 whose developers were among the first people to adapt George Miller’s outback junkyard aesthetic. It’s also the second film I’ve seen this year to rip off Miller’s Furiosa, the first being Deadpool & Wolverine. (Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, give Furiosa a chance.)
The star of the show is Cate Blanchett as Lilith, one of four playable characters from the original Borderlands. Blanchett is cursed with a stiff red hairdo that, for badfilm aficionados, will bring up memories of Frances McDormand’s fright wig in Æon Flux. Lilith is a space bounty hunter who’s “getting too old for this shit.” When she’s offered a very impressive sum by Atlas (Édgar Ramírez) to rescue his daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from rogue trooper Roland (Kevin Hart), who has taken her to Pandora, she responds by killing the messenger. Literally.
After hooking up with Claptrap, the mandatory R2-D2 figure, Lilith finds Tiny Tina, who has befriended another playable character, Krieg (Florian Munteanu). He is a renegade Psycho, the oh-so creatively named legion of canon fodder every first-person shooter needs. After evading Atlas’ goon squad, they end up at, what else, a crazy frontier bar owned by Mad Moxxi (Gina Gershon). There, they meet Dr. Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis, feathering her 401(k)), an archeologist who knows the way to the Vault, the lost alien treasure repository that is Pandora’s only tourist attraction. (Get it? Pandora’s Box? It wasn’t funny in 2009, either.)
Borderlands’ vibes feel as mercenary as the characters. Blanchett, who may be physically incapable of giving a bad performance, hits her marks and sneers. Hart and Curtis seem to be devoted to expending as little energy as possible. Ramírez delivers not one but two slow claps. Greenblatt’s screen presence is like nails on a chalkboard. Badfilm legend Gershon, of Cocktail and Showgirls fame, brings the same vacuous energy here.
Borderlands channels all of the worst tics from the two decades of mediocre blockbuster cinema. It’s got that flat Marvel lighting; characters who appear just to check a box on some Reddit filmbro’s wish list, then disappear without a trace; hyper-violent yet listless action sequences; an off-putting sadistic streak; and the kind of quippy dialogue that would cause Joss Whedon to yell at an entire writer’s room. (Credited writer Joe Crombie is a pseudonym. At least eight other writers reportedly worked on the script, but none of them would put their name on it.) Everything about Borderlands reminded me of, and made me wish I was watching, another, better movie.
Memphis filmmaker Zaire Love’s confidence was boosted when she won both the Best Narrative Short and the Best Documentary Short awards at Indie Memphis 2023. It was a feat that had never been equalled in the 25 year history of the festival. “On a personal level, it really showed me that I can do it,” she says.
For “Slice,” the winning documentary short, it was only the beginning. “We had our festival run in 2023, and we got into over 20 festivals,” she says. “We won seven festivals. And honestly, that’s rare. It is rare that you get into that many festivals, and it is rare that you are winning or a finalist in it.”
“Slice” is about a uniquely Memphis sport. Think of it as the aquatic equivalent of jookin — acrobatic dives that are unlike the highly technical aerial maneuvers you’ll see at the Paris Olympics over the next two weeks. “Rico [the subject of “Slice”] says if you took somebody at the Olympics, they couldn’t even do what we do,” says Love.
For Love, the short film took up much more of her life than she had expected when she started filming four years ago. “I graduated my MFA program in 2020, and that’s when I considered myself what I wanted to be: a filmmaker. Right after graduation, I start this project that I’m thinking is going to be something that only takes maybe two weeks, and then I’m out of here. But it did take longer. And it has proven to be life-changing.”
The truth is, most documentaries take longer to make than narrative films. “It’s a whole different beast,” says Love. “You can plan all you want, but in documentary, you really have to be able to pivot, because you didn’t know that you were going to get certain gems, certain really special moments that you can’t just file away in the archive. So you got to figure out how to put those nuggets in your film.”
After gaining attention on the festival circuit, “Slice” was licensed by The New Yorker as part of their film series. It premiered on Thursday, July 25th, the day before the Paris Olympic’s opening ceremonies. “I learned that we have so many stories that need to be told, but I also learned to trust myself and trust my vision. Trust that me coming to a project with good intentions to, again, amplify and immortalize, it just showed me that I can do this. It really shows me that like Andre 3000 said, the Black South got something to say, and people really want to listen. So I just feel like it was just confirmation that this is what I’m supposed to be doing in life. This is why I’m here.”
Daisy Edgar-Jones and
Glen Powell chase storms and each other in Twisters. (Photo: Courtesy Universal Pictures)
Legend has it that when James Cameron, fresh off of the success of The Terminator, made his pitch to 20th Century Fox executives that his next film should be a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, he simply wrote the name of the film on a whiteboard and added an “s.” Then he put a line through the “s,” so that it read Alien$. The execs immediately greenlit Aliens, which went on to earn the 2024 equivalent of half a billion dollars at the box office.
One wonders if that story was on the mind of Joseph Kosinski when he went to Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to pitch his idea for a sequel to the 1996 disaster film Twister. Simply adding the “s” did get the film greelit, but Kosinski himself didn’t get the directing gig. That went to Lee Isaac Chung, whose last film, Minari, was an Oscar-nominated story about Korean immigrants trying to make it as farmers in Arkansas. (Don’t feel bad for Kosinski. He directed Top Gun: Maverickinstead.)
Unfortunately, I’m here to tell you that Twisters is no Aliens. Cameron expanded the original idea of “haunted house movie in space” into a knock-down, drag-out sci-fi action picture. Twisters just does the same thing as Twister, only with more tornadoes.
But more tornadoes are better, right? Not if you’re from Oklahoma, like Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), the wunderkind meteorologist turned storm-chaser. She’s seen twisters devastate Tornado Alley too many times. Now, with her friend Javi Rivera (Anthony Ramos) and a group of like-minded grad schoolers in tow, she’s trying out a radical, new theory. Kate doesn’t just want to chase tornadoes; she wants to destroy tornadoes. Her plan is to launch barrels full of sodium polyacrylate — the moisture absorbing chemical used in diapers — directly into a tornado. The chemical onslaught will absorb the swirling water vapor which fuels the tornado, causing the funnel cloud to fall apart, and allowing the storm-chasers to live happily ever after. Unfortunately for both her dissertation and the continued health of her fellow storm-chasers, the tornado she chooses for a test turns out to be an F5 monster, but she only brought enough diaper goo to tame an F1.
Five years later, Kate’s got a steady job as an NOAA weather forecaster, based in New York City. Javi shows up at her office with a proposition. He’s working for Storm Par, a company that’s using military-grade antimissile radar to scan active tornadoes, which they hope will greatly improve forecasts for their private clients. After initially refusing the call to adventure like any good Hero’s Journey protagonist, she agrees to get back in the storm-chasing game. Back in Oklahoma for the kind of “once in a generation” tornado outbreak which happens every year nowadays, she meets Tyler Owens (Glen Powell, Hangman from Top Gun: Maverick), a storm-chaser with a thriving YouTube channel, a tricked-out truck, and a gang of plucky misfits. Since Kate is on the Heroine’s Journey, she’s got two guys to choose from. Will it be her nerdy old friend Javi or the hunky “cowboy meteorologist”? And how many more will have to die before both teams realize Kate’s anti-tornado tech was on the right track?
The answers to Twisters pressing questions are: 1. It doesn’t matter, and 2. Lots of people who also don’t matter. Sure, Powell’s jawline is so strong Tom Cruise could land an F-18 on it, but when it comes to romantic tension, Twisters is totally flaccid. Even though the tornado outbreak flattens farms houses, rodeos, and, in a nod to The Blob, a sold-out movie theater, this disaster movie is bloodless. Chung is a good director of actors, and Edgar-Jones, Powell, and Ramos give it their best shot, but they can’t seem to elevate the action into something I cared about, even when the bad guys are revealed to be disaster capitalist chuds of the We Buy Houses variety. Part of the problem is that Twisters is so repetitive. The opening scene with Kate and company fleeing from an F5 crackles, but it soon becomes evident that the intro emptied Chung’s trick bag. Twisters isn’t a bad film, per se; the Marvel era has produced much worse pablum than this. But it does commit the summer blockbuster’s worst possible sin: It’s just plain dull.
The Pixar masterpiece gets a sequel. Riley, the runaway girl from the first film, is a teenager now. And that means a whole new set of emotions to deal with. Inside Riley’s head, Joy (Amy Poehler) is still trying to keep it together, as Riley enters the psychic chaos of high school. Now she’s joined by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adele Exarchopousos), and Embarassment (Paul Walter Hauser). Longtime Pixar creative exec Kelsey Mann takes over the helm from Pete Docter, who made the original an enduring classic.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die
The Memphis Flyer’s own Kailynn Johnson says “Longtime fans will be reminded as to why this pair works so well together in the buddy-cop genre. Thousands of slap-happy think pieces and unsolicited marriage tidbits later, Smith is still refreshing, and we’re reminded of why the camera loves him. Lawrence’s comedic legacy precedes him, and his impeccable delivery doesn’t disappoint.” Given the $125 million the film has stacked up in a week, viewers agree.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
George Miller’s story of how the hero of Fury Road became an Imperator in the army of Immortan Joe is the most epic thing you will see this year. Anya Taylor Joy and Alyla Browne portray Furiosa in this 15-year saga of loss and redemption in post-apocalyptic Australia. The sci fi action is a feast for the eyes, but Miller never fails to engage the mind while rocking the body. Read my review.
Peter Jackson’s epic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy novels dominated the turn-of-the-century box office, and stimulated the imagination of a generation. Now the three films are back in theaters for a limited engagement in 4K and the full director’s cuts.
Hollywood is not exactly a place where justice flourishes. But aside from all of the sexual assault, and the way some white guys keep failing upward, one of the biggest injustices in Hollywood is the fact that there is no Academy Awards category for stunt work.
I don’t know if you’ve looked at a movie lately, but stunt performers are getting more screen time than ever. Many great pioneers of cinema built their reputations on hair-raising stunts: Think Charlie Chaplin roller-skating backwards on the edge of an abyss in Modern Times, or Buster Keaton riding on a locomotive cow catcher, batting railroad ties off the tracks in The General. Jackie Chan, the king of the Hong Kong stunt performers, has broken so many bones his injuries were shown as outtakes in his film’s credit sequences. Chan’s pain became part of his star attraction.
It’s not like stunt work is not artistic. Look at the greatest film of the 21st century, Mad Max: Fury Road, and tell me the pole cat attack, where the performers are swinging on 20-foot poles mounted on vehicles traveling 80 miles per hour, is not artistic. Even if you do define “art” more narrowly, there’s still the existence of technical categories like Best Sound Design and Best Visual Effects. Stunt work is every bit as necessary for the success of the film as the talented professionals in those categories.
And look, if you want to jazz up the rating of the Academy Awards (and who doesn’t want jazzier ratings?), adding categories where Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious could win something is just the ticket.
One person who definitely agrees with me on this, the most pressing issue of our time, is director David Leitch. He’s a former stunt performer himself, having been at one time Brad Pitt’s stunt double of choice, before directing the star in Bullet Train. He’s also the co-creator of the John Wick franchise, which has taken fight choreography into the realm of modern dance. The Fall Guy is his love letter to the world of stunt performers. It’s the rare action movie that really feels like it’s made with love.
It’s also relentlessly inside baseball because there’s nothing film people like more than films about themselves, or “self-reflexivity” in film theory-speak. The Fall Guy is ostensibly based on a TV series from the 1980s starring a post-Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors as a stunt man who solves crimes. (In the 1980s, it was a requirement that every TV star had to solve crimes. But I digress.) In a weird way, The Fall Guy owes a great deal to Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, the 1971 romantic comedy about a film set that’s always on the verge of falling to pieces but never quite does.
Leitch’s star is Ryan Gosling, and to say he’s perfect for the role of Colt Seavers is a profound understatement. The source material is a notoriously rich vein of Reagan ’80s masculinity, with Majors driving a truck and singing country music between bringing in bounties. Gosling brings some much needed Kenergy to the role. This Colt Seavers cries to Taylor Swift songs. There’s not too many actors who could convincingly make a phone confession of their love to their girlfriend, director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), while also fleeing from assassins in a stolen speedboat.
Jody and Colt met years ago when she was a camera op and he was the preferred stunt double for megastar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). While filming Tom’s latest sci-fi blockbuster, their relationship evolves from a semi-recurring, on-set fling (which is a fairly common thing in the film world) to something more serious. Then, producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) insists Colt do another take of a dangerous high fall. Colt’s luck runs out, and he wakes up on a stretcher with a broken back.
Eighteen months later, Colt is hiding out in Los Angeles, working as a valet at a Mexican restaurant, when Gail catches up with him. Jody is directing her first big feature film, a passion project she and Gail have worked for years to put together. They need Colt for a big stunt, a dangerous cannon roll on a beach. Jody has personally asked for him, Gail says, to support her as she tries to make good on her first big break. More inside baseball: Jody’s “passion project” is apparently a remake of the 1983 movie Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, a 3D debacle so notoriously awful it is nowadays only watched by sick cinematic masochists such as myself.
Colt arrives on set in Sydney and pulls off the spectacular stunt, which in real life broke the Guinness World Record for most on-screen rolls by a car — a fact the film-within-a-film’s stunt coordinator Dan (Winston Duke) points out. But Jody’s not happy to see Colt. She was crushed when he cut off contact after the accident, and tells him via bullhorn as she repeatedly sets him on fire. “That was perfect! Let’s do it again!”
When Colt confronts Gail, she reveals the real reason he’s been brought on board. Tom Ryder has gone missing, and since he and Colt used to be tight, Gail thinks he would be the best at discreetly tracking down the wayward movie star before Jody and Universal Pictures find out he’s gone AWOL.
Gosling and Blunt are breezy and charming, and the supporting cast all understand the assignment. The whole point of the now-forgotten TV series was to cut to the chase, forget about all those pesky story beats, and get to the good stunts. The Fall Guy is at its best when it’s putting its small army of crack stunt performers through their paces with the safety wires and crash bags fully visible for once. It only makes the stunts more harrowing by emphasizing the human frailty of the performers.
“I have a rose on my thumb because I just love love,” he says. “I love the idea of love. I just struggle with it a lot.”
He has a sailboat tattoo on his wrist. That’s a reminder to “remember to just go with the flow. Life will take you this way and that way.”
Since Brooks, 30, began making movies as a child, life has taken him to the Sundance Film Festival as winner of the Sundance Ignite award. He won the $10,000 Memphis Film Prize twice for his movies in 2018 and 2019. And he’s earned several awards for his short films and music videos at the Indie Memphis Film Festival.
His recent movie, “What Were You Meant For?,” which deals with Black male identity, is included in the current Crosstown Arts film exhibition.
Filmmaker Craig Brewer is a Brooks fan. “I remember seeing this short he had made and thinking, ‘I’ve never seen Memphis kids skateboarding look so epic and beautiful,’” Brewer says. “It was cinema. It wasn’t just skateboarding. Ever since then Kevin has been growing as a storyteller, as a director.”
It all began with Power Rangers when Brooks was 5 years old. “I used to have toy Power Rangers as a little kid,” Brooks says. “And I used to mimic their voices and make them do certain things.” He reenacted scenes from the Power Rangers shows. “I guess that was my way of storytelling and making movies.”
When he was 6, Brooks began using a VHS camcorder his dad bought. “I remember him taking it around the house saying, ‘Press this button,’ which was the red button. ‘And you go and record things. Then if you hit the rewind button, you can watch it back.’ I thought that was the most amazing thing ever. He taught me stop-motion animation.”
Brooks began filming his Power Rangers with his dad’s camera. “I’d just pan back and forth, left and right. After I did that first recording, I would go around recording the dog and just anything.”
That same year, his parents took him to see The Matrix. “That movie was more visually appealing than any movie I had ever seen. It just blew me away. For one, I visually remember the infamous Keanu Reeves-dodging-the-bullet scene. And I remember trying to recreate that. Just myself. Just in my room. Trying to bend backwards. Keep falling over and over again.”
After viewing the movie 20 times on a VHS tape, Brooks discovered the movie included a special feature at the end of the credits that showed how the moviemakers created that bullet effect. “I knew movies weren’t real, but seeing what went into it and seeing the directors telling people it would be this and that, I think that is what got me. Just, ‘This is a world I have got to be in.’”
Skating to Sundance
By the time he was 7, Brooks was making short 30-second films. He didn’t think he wanted to make a living as a filmmaker, but, he says, “I knew I wanted to be in the realm of making movies. At the same time, I was playing basketball really heavy.”
Basketball overshadowed moviemaking for a while. But Brooks continued to get blown away by cinema. He loved films by Quentin Tarantino, Terrence Malick, and Steven Spielberg.
Basketball, eventually, took a backseat to filmmaking. “That’s when things started to change. Before that, I was really wanting to go down the path of being a basketball player. Trying hard. My love just wasn’t there for it anymore. Before the games, I dreaded playing. It was a weird feeling.”
Plan B was moviemaking. “It was always around.”
To make a little cash on the side, Brooks made music videos for local artists. Making videos as well as short films in high school helped him as a filmmaker. “It taught me how to record on the fly. How to grab what I need for the edit and think of the edit while I’m recording — that taught me a lot. At the same time, I knew I wanted to tell my own stories and gear more toward narrative and documentary filmmaking.”
Brooks, who majored in film and production at University of Memphis, made a short film, “Keep Pushing,” during his senior year. “That was my first thing I was super proud of.”
His idea was to cast real skateboarders to showcase their expertise. He then met skateboarder Husain Razvi, who told him, “Man, what if you just follow me around?”
“I was like, ‘Follow you around?’ Husain can skate, but he’s not doing tricks. What he’s doing is just kicking the board, going down the ramps, but nothing exciting like I was going to have these guys doing.”
Then, Brooks says, “A light bulb clicked. And I was like, ‘I was trying to tell the story of all these people who are great skaters.’”
Instead, he shot Razvi. “I filmed him every single part of his day.”
The 10-minute film turned into a documentary. “It was great footage. Him interacting with kids. Him talking about life.”
Brooks was looking at his phone one day in geology class when something caught his attention. “I see that Sundance has this program for 18- to 24-year-olds for short films. It has to be 10 minutes long. You have to turn it in within the next two weeks.”
Brooks went to work on his film about Razvi. “For the next two weeks, all I did was edit. I stayed up every night editing it. I put my own music to it.”
Four weeks later, Brooks received an email that read, “You have been selected as one of the top five filmmakers to be part of the Sundance Ignite program. We will fly you out. We will take care of everything.”
Brooks was stunned. “I literally almost started crying.”
He attended the festival in Park City, Utah. People praised the film. “They were saying that it just felt like you were really there in that world. And the camera movement really made you analyze things differently. They were saying they fell in love with Husain as a character because he felt so real.
“They were saying after the film they had this different outlook on what it means to be successful, what it means to go through life, and how it’s not right to always be in competition with one another.
“The film is about Husain. He’s not great at skateboarding, but he loves doing it every single day. No matter what, you’re not going to stop him. I don’t care if you’re the best skateboarder. He’s not going to compare himself to you. That’s just his nature. He’s like, ‘I’m in my own world and I’m going to take my place and I’m going to do what I do and I’m in love with what I’m doing.’ I think that’s remarkable. That story worked out because of Husain being the most honest human being.”
Brooks continued to make movies after Sundance. “Marcus,” which made it in the top 10 for the Memphis Film Prize, is “a short film that examines the retaliatory state of gang violence.”
“Myron,” which stars Lawrence Matthews, is about “a young Black man who embarks on a day full of skateboarding with his friends who are predominantly white.” He returns home “with a different outlook on life, and how he’s truly seen in society.”
“Grace,” which stars Rosalind Ross, is about a prostitute who always dreamed about singing on the big stage. “She gets her chance when she comes across a flier for a karaoke contest,” Brooks says.
His next film, “Bonfire,” is a “meditative piece on the nature of love and heartbreak. I was inspired by a big breakup that took place. I wanted to get my emotions out, and the best way for me to do that was through film.”
“So, I got my friends together and gave them cameras. And we would go out on the weekend and film scenes with different people and ask them, ‘What is love to you?’ It was very cathartic, and the making of it was experimental. It was highly influenced by Terrence Malick films.”
The movie premiered at the Indie Memphis Film Festival, where it won the Hometowner Documentary Short award in 2018.
His narrative film, “Last Day,” is “about a guy’s last day with his family before he’s sent off to prison.” He won his first $10,000 Memphis Film Prize with that film.
Brooks won his second Memphis Film Prize for his movie, “A Night Out.” “After a bad breakup a woman goes out with her friends for a girls’ night out. But the night doesn’t end the way she expects.”
Indie Memphis awarded Brooks and his co-director Abby Meyers $10,000 for their film “A Night Out.” (Photo: Courtesy Kevin Brooks)
He collaborated on “Night Out” with his friend Abby Meyers, who co-directed the film. “That came from hearing so many stories of women being sexually assaulted,” he says.
Brooks continued to make music videos, including one for Talibah Safiya’s “Healing Creek,” which won the Best Hometowner Music Video award in the Video Memphis competition.
In 2020 Brooks was included among the Memphis Flyer’s 20<30 honorees. He then went to work for Kellogg’s, shooting five episodes around the United States for a mini series, Black Girls Run. The series, which was about “promoting health in the Black community,” featured young women training for their first 5K.
Brooks also did a project for McDonald’s, where he traveled to Los Angeles and “highlighted kids in different sectors who were doing amazing things in the Black community,” he says.
One young man was into finance and a young woman was into fashion. But they were all “game changers.”
“I love connecting with people through stories, and opportunities just come about,” Brooks says. “If it’s a story or an opportunity for me to use my voice in that capacity, I’m 100 percent in.”
In 2022, Brooks went to work in his present job as a videographer for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He interviews and films patients telling their stories.
Brooks won the Hometowner Documentary Short for “Bonfire.” (Photo: Courtesy Kevin Brooks)
Enjoy the Journey
In 2023, Brooks got serious about working on his own feature film. “I wanted to do a feature for so long and put so much pressure on it. When I felt every door was closing, I felt jaded. I just wasn’t sure what my next move would be in terms of independent filmmaking.”
But, he says, “Through that period, I also found that inner kid who was in me again, who just wanted to go out and make movies for fun.”
Brooks returned to moviemaking when he made “Embers of Self,” which played opening night at Indie Memphis Film Festival’s Hometowner Shorts Showcase. “That really got me going, just because it was me being free and making things without a result,” Brooks says. “That’s how art should be. I had gotten away from that.”
Brooks felt he had been “focusing on the end result and not the process.”
That’s when he came up with his Crosstown Arts film. The movie is “just about masculinity and the ways that I have maneuvered in this world because of that label.”
He deals with the idea that Black men “always have to be super masculine,” and that it’s okay to be vulnerable.
Brooks currently is knee-deep into preproduction for a feature film. “I’m really 100 percent going headfirst into it. And I’m doing it my way.
“If it touches one person, that means a lot,” he adds.
Says Brewer: “The thing I’m most impressed with him is, he is hungry for knowledge and always looking for a way to improve himself and keep in the game of filmmaking. Some people burn out. Some people get discouraged. And there’s a lot in this craft that can turn you off to it. But he manages to push through and stay positive and stay creative.”
“He’s a rare one,” says filmmaker Tom Shadyac. “Full of passion, commitment, and talent. He doesn’t just make movies to tell stories. It’s not just a means to an end for him. It’s more holistic for Kevin. He cares about his subjects and subject matter. For him, the means are the end.”
Among the tattoos Brooks sports are ones that read, “Keep Pushing” and “Enjoy the Journey.”
“You’ve got to do those two things,” he says. “You just have to keep pushing. You have to enjoy the journey that you’re on and know that things are not going to happen fast. But if you just follow Husain’s route and just wake up every day and do what you love, then things will work out.”
Godzilla (left) and King Kong (right) do stuff in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. (Courtesy Legendary)
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Adam Wingard’s sequel to 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong ads a weird “x” to the title. The big lizard and the big ape team up to fight off a mysterious threat from beneath the Hollow Earth. Expect extremely large things smashing into other extremely large things. Also, King Kong’s got a robot arm.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
The second film with “Empire” in the title on screens this week features the old Ghostbusters cast, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, and Ernie Hudson, teaming up with the new Ghostbusters cast, Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, and Mckenna Grace, to battle a supernatural force so scary it literally freezes everyone and everything.
Kung Fu Panda 4
Jack Black returns as Po the Dragon Warrior panda who is given a new assignment by his master, voiced by Dustin Hoffman: He is to oversee the Valley of Peace. Will the hot-headed warrior warm to his life change? Or will he open a can of panda kung fu whoop-ass on The Chameleon (Viola Davis)?
Immaculate
Sydney Sweeney stars as a Sister Cecilia, a nun headed to a new convent in Italy on the express invitation of Father Sal Tedeschi (Alvaro Morte), who is definitely not trying to clone Jesus and use Cecilia as a surrogate Virgin Mary, because that would be blasphemy, right?
Days of Heaven
On Thursday, April 4th, the Crosstown Arts Film Series presents Terrence Malick’s second film, 1978’s Days of Heaven. It stars a very young Richard Gere as Bill, who flees the Chicago police to Texas, where he competes for the love of Abby (Brooke Adams) with a stable, handsome farmer (Sam Shepard, also very young.) The 1978 Academy Award winner for Best Cinematography is one of the most gorgeously shot films ever made.
My Neighbor Totoro
If Malick ain’t your speed, April 4th is also Anime Night at Black Lodge. Hop on the Catbus for Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 cult classic.
Anwar Jamison and Nana Ama McBrown reprise their roles in Coming to Africa’s sequel.
Anwar Jamison set out to do something very few people have ever done: The Memphis-based filmmaker wanted to shoot a movie in Ghana. The second-largest country in West Africa is undergoing a period of economic expansion, and Jamison was fascinated with the young democracy’s success story. It was a long fight, but after enduring setbacks such as the lead actor bailing on the project right before he was supposed to get on the plane, Jamison finally completed Coming to Africa — just in time for the 2020 Covid pandemic to shut down movie theaters worldwide.
“The premiere was at the Las Vegas Black Film Festival, which I believe the first physical film festival that opened back up during that time,” says Jamison. “Then I had the chance to come back and do Indie Memphis. … I took it to Ghana, had a great response over there in the cinemas. But, again, it was somewhat slow because I guess we were kind of pioneers in that space. We were one of the first movies that came out as their cinemas reopened because they had been closed a lot longer than ours over here due to Covid.”
After an indie theatrical release in the U.S., Coming to Africa was released on Amazon Prime Video, where, Jamison says, “It was really, really well received! Then I moved it over to Tubi and [Roku streaming channel] kweliTV, who I really enjoy working with. DeShuna Spencer runs it right here out of Memphis.”
But if the original Coming to Africa was a struggle, things were easier for the sequel, Welcome to Ghana. In the first installment, Jamison took over the lead acting role out of necessity, playing Adrian, an ambitious American business executive who has his life changed on a visit to Ghana’s bustling capital, Accra. Much of that life-change is thanks to Akosua, a charming schoolteacher played by Nana Ama McBrown. “It was my first time in Ghana, literally,” he says. “In a way, that helped me play the character because I was in the same situation as the character. I literally was seeing these things for the first time. This time, I was able to have more of a game plan ahead of time and say, ‘This is how I want to do things.’”
As a result, Welcome to Ghana is considerably more ambitious. Akosua and Adrian are planning to get married, but her family doesn’t approve — and that’s just the first complication. Jamison wanted to make an ensemble comedy, and the success of the first film in Africa and the opportunity to work with McBrown, the biggest star in Ghana, helped open lots of doors. “It really turned into a who’s who of actresses and actors who are the cream of the crop over there. It is a true ensemble cast. They were looking around at each other on the set like, ‘Wow! We’ve never really been in a movie together!’ I was able, from the outside, to kind of pull people together. In Ghanian film, you’re going to have political ties. This actor works with their director only, or, this actor works with this production company. But me from the outside, I was able to just grab people who I was familiar with, who are some of my favorites in Ghana and Sierra Leone, and pull ’em all together.”
The film had its world premiere in Accra on the same day last summer as Barbie. “The biggest Hollywood movies are big in Ghana,” says Jamison. “So I was proud that we smashed Barbie that day! Barbie had a nice crowd. But for us, Coming to Africa: Welcome to Ghana, it was out of control!”
The film is now streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi. “The story is very universal, so it crosses geographical, cultural, racial, ethnic boundaries,” says Jamison. “You’re getting all of these cultural things, but once you sink into the story, you realize they do a lot of the same things we do. So you get to see differences in the culture, but you also get to see those similarities.”
Jamison says he’s finishing his doctoral dissertation on African cinema before he starts prepping the final film in the trilogy. “I want Memphis to know that this was made by a Memphis filmmaker, and I want them to know that we took a lot of pride in putting it together, and that we put Memphis on the map in Ghana!”
Coming to Africa: Welcome to Ghana is streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi.
